The Last Chairlift

53. THE VOICE ON THE SUBWAY; THE SILENCE IN THE ROCK GARDEN

Henrik hadn’t written Em when Nora died. I had written him after our cousin’s death, but he hadn’t responded. Henrik had always been wary of Molly; when the old patroller died in January 2006, Henrik’s inner writer was unleashed. He wrote me at the snowshoer’s East Sixty-fourth Street address, and he wrote Em twice, sending the same letter to Em’s Toronto address and in care of her New York publisher; that was why Grace saw it.

Henrik wrote that he was going to rent a U-Haul truck and come to Manchester to get his guns, or he was sending a couple of “college boys” to get them for him. Henrik offered no condolences for Molly. When we heard about the old patroller, Em and I were in Canada. We came back to the States and went through Molly’s Manchester house, with Matthew and Grace. Naturally, there were things of sentimental value. Each of us took things we wanted. We could have taken a gun or two, before Henrik or the college boys drove my uncles’ arsenal of weapons down to Dixie, but Em and I were done with guns, and Grace had never wanted one. Like most boys, Matthew wanted to have a gun, but he was fourteen; he was too young to have a say in the matter.

“We’re just keeping the guns for Henrik, sweetie—we’re not going to start a war or anything,” my mom had told me, but there were more guns hidden away in the Manchester house than I’d imagined. The old patroller had left the house to me. I knew my mother had arranged this. Except for Molly’s twenty-gauge, the guns had belonged to Uncle Johan and Uncle Martin. Henrik was champing at the bit to have them.

“That’s a shitload of lethal weapons, kiddo,” Em said, when she saw the guns gathered together. “Everyone in Vermont—not to mention, the deer—will be safer when these guns are down in Dixie.” Em and I never said the name of the southern state where Henrik had gone to college, just to play lacrosse—the same state Henrik served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Not saying the name of Henrik’s state was almost as good as forgetting it. We wished we’d never known Henrik in the first place.

Em reminded me that Henrik had married a second time, when he was in his forties; he’d had no children with his first wife, and only one with the second. Nora had hoped Henrik’s kid would be a girl. Henrik would have nothing to do with a daughter, Nora said—she meant a girl might have a fighting chance to be herself. If Henrik had a boy, Nora said, the poor kid would be like his father.

The boy was twentysomething when he and a lacrosse teammate took turns driving the U-Haul truck all the way to Vermont. Henrik had named him Johan, after his father, but the kid was a Johan in name only—he lacked the Norwegian’s good nature. I’d told Matthew the stories—how Henrik had bullied me, how Nora had bullied him back. Matthew was dying to meet Henrik, but Em and I doubted the old congressman would do the gunrunning himself. We wondered if young Johan might be one of the college boys. Henrik had written once more, only to me. “We call him Johnny,” Henrik wrote. “The Johan didn’t go over big, not down here.” That was the last I would hear from Henrik—not counting the consequences of his party’s policies.

Johnny called Grace’s number when the gunrunners got to Molly’s driveway. Grace’s parents had passed away; their house in Manchester was Grace’s now. Arthur Barrett had beaten the ball drop in Times Square; he’d permanently put his pajamas on before the ball could drop again. Grace and Matthew met the two lacrosse teammates in Molly’s driveway. When the old patroller died, I just knew I was done with Vermont and that driveway, where my mom’s mission of mercy was tragically averted.

Grace said the southern college boys were the worst male jocks imaginable. “They’re from a subculture of misogynist insouciance—women make them slouch,” Grace said.

“Lax bros,” Matthew called the gunrunners. Johnny sounded like he was a hundred percent Henrik.

“The chill attitude, the backward baseball caps—those boys would have beaten up Matthew if I hadn’t been there,” Grace went on.

“They would have raped you if I hadn’t been there!” Matthew told his mom.

“Don’t go there, Matthew—raging puberty is ahead of you. You’ll be there soon enough,” Grace said.

Em and I were staying away from the raging puberty business. We were in the East Sixty-fourth Street apartment, trying not to think about what had happened to the old patroller. We’d been moving to Toronto in a part-time fashion, mostly because we wanted to see as much of Molly in Vermont as possible. Em and I wanted to divide our time between Toronto and the snowshoer’s pied-à-terre for as long as Matthew was in school in New York.

“You two almost-Canadians will go the whole hog now, I imagine,” Grace had said to us. We knew the raging puberty business was Grace’s version of what was about to wreak havoc in her household. She’d met “someone serious,” as Grace put it. Jeremy was a younger man; he was also in publishing.

“You should definitely try a younger man—I like it better than I thought I would,” Em had told Grace.

Jeremy had two young daughters, not a lot younger than Matthew. “They soon will be starting puberty,” Grace had forewarned Matthew. For now, Matthew liked the girls, and he liked Jeremy. Matthew admitted to Em and me that his mom had made him anxious about his own puberty; the onset of the girls’ puberty sounded worse. Grace was projecting her experience with puberty onto the girls. She’d told me stories of her painful periods; she’d had terrible tampon problems. Poor Matthew was imagining these girls he’d met and liked—how they would be changed by their excruciating bleeding.

“The girls will soon be over puberty, as you will soon be over it,” I tried to assure Matthew, but he remained wary; his mother made it sound like puberty would be raging all around him. It was Em who got through to Matthew, by being funny about it.

“When you can’t put anything anywhere without getting blood all over it, that’s a good time to come see us in Toronto,” Em told him. “Or you can bring the girls to Toronto, and they can bleed with us for a while—it may be your mom who’ll need a break from all the puberty that’s happening,” Em said. Then Em did a little puberty pantomime; it wasn’t too explicit for Matthew. Em just danced around, like she had her period coming on. She was singing her own version of the Jerry Lee Lewis song—“a whole lotta bleedin’ goin’ on,” she was singing—when Matthew started laughing, and he sang along with her. For now, the raging puberty wasn’t a problem.

Em and I had met Jeremy, and his girls. We liked them, too, and we wanted Grace to be happy. I knew the only song Em was seriously singing. Em really meant what she sang to me in my sleep, when she was brainwashing me—and now I was the one singing it. It’s not hard to learn “O Canada,” but I was trying to learn both the English and the French versions. I knew one day I would have to sing it. At my swearing-in ceremony, when I took the Oath of Citizenship, I would also sing my new national anthem.

For now, the old Norwegians’ guns had gone down to Dixie, but the old patroller was gone forever—not just down south. “In America, kiddo, the guns don’t ever go away—they just turn up somewhere else,” was the way Em put it.

When it came to missing Molly, there would be no fooling around about it; there was only the missing part, or the part about seeing her in my heart. Molly was all business, no fooling around; in the old patroller’s opinion, ghosts were just fooling around. When I missed Molly, if I wanted to see her, I had to look in my heart.

Sometimes in my sleep, or in my dreams, I’m standing at the top of the Blue Ribbon Quad on Bromley Mountain. I’m looking at the foremost, downhill-facing chair on the lift—the chair closest to the edge of the loading platform, where the safety net is. It’s too early in the morning for the chairlift to be running. I can see the sign that says NO DOWNHILL LOADING when I look east—in the direction of Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire—where the sunrise is. But I’m not in this dream to see the sunrise. The chairlift is a hearse, a waiting hearse; all that’s missing are the bodies.

Sometimes the old patroller and I are climbing up Bromley Mountain. We’re near the top of Upper Twister, where what Molly called the Rock Garden is—that was where we noticed how the earlier climbers’ tracks changed. My mother had some trouble on the second steep part of Twister. The old patroller and I saw only the snowshoer’s tracks the rest of the way. That was when we knew Elliot Barlow, the only hero, carried her piggyback to the top.

Loved ones leave us and we go on—ghosts or no ghosts, my way or Molly’s, we still see them. As Matthew and I knew, the dead don’t entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.

Matthew and I knew that all the Christmas trees in Canada were blue to Em. We understood that the blue Christmas trees were “psychologically” true—“in Em’s mind,” was the way we put it. In the last week of January 2006, when we lost Molly, Matthew was fourteen—almost fifteen. He was beginning to be comfortable with words like psychologically.

Some confusion was caused by the appearance of an actual blue Christmas tree in Toronto—a big one. Matthew said the blue tree was part of a neighborhood program called the Cavalcade of Lights, but everything about the giant blue Christmas tree would remain a mystery to me. I just remember the first Christmas season we saw it, the Christmas and New Year’s of 2005–2006, because that was when I heard about the old patroller.

“The tree is fifteen meters, almost fifty feet, and they’re talking about making it taller,” Matthew told us. He knew Em and I were too old, or too American, to learn the metric system. We would never know how to tell the temperature on the Celsius scale; Em and I were Fahrenheit people. The sculpture of a Christmas tree with blue lights looked even taller on the Canadian Pacific Railway overpass at Yonge Street, just north of Scrivener Square—an enormous blue Christmas tree, atop the trestlework of a railway bridge in midtown Toronto. Matthew and I loved the blue tree, but Em scarcely noticed it.

“Another Christmas tree—it must be almost that time of year,” was all Em said, when she first saw it.

“It’s blue,” I pointed out, but Em just shrugged and scuffed her feet—in Little Ray’s indifferent, jock-walking way.

Those two ghosts took some interest in the blue Christmas tree. Aboveground, my mom and the snowshoer didn’t venture far from the Summerhill subway station, but the big blue tree captured their limited attention for a while. I saw them occasionally in the underpass, beneath the railway bridge, where the noise of the traffic on Yonge Street was exaggerated. Those two seemed to like the whooshing sound, or the heightened roar of the engines. They were piggybacking each other around, in their juvenile fashion; when they saw me, they just waved and disappeared, or they went back to the subway.

It was early one morning, the third week of January 2006—bright and cold in Toronto. I’d brought my old ski clothes to Em’s house on Shaftesbury Avenue, because Toronto was a good city for winter walks. I was out walking, a bit after sunrise; I went north on Yonge Street, heading into a northeast wind. The wind was getting to me at Eglinton, where I took the subway back to Summerhill Station. It was crowded and warm on the subway, standing-room only—the morning rush hour on the trains going downtown. I had no idea what my mom and the snowshoer thought about rush hour, or if they thought about it. I didn’t know if they thought about anything—all those two did was fool around. At first, I didn’t see them on the crowded train.

The standing-room only must get in the way of their piggybacking, I was thinking—their single-leg lunges wouldn’t work at rush hour. I was about to get off the train when I saw them. Little Ray was curled up in Mr. Barlow’s lap; they were huddled together in a seat by the door. My mom was sobbing, but the little English teacher was looking straight at me. I could read her lips before the door closed: Go home, the snowshoer was telling me before I got off the train. I was frightened, not knowing what was wrong. My foremost fear was for Matthew. It was a school day in New York; something could have happened there. I imagined Em was still in bed, or she might be making her breakfast when I got back to the house. Maybe something had happened to Em, I was thinking, as I ran along Shaftesbury Avenue.

As we grow older, we learn how memories work. The people we miss know where to find us—on the subway, or in our hearts. When I got home from Summerhill Station, Em was on the phone.

Willy would find Molly in the Rock Garden, in the steeps of Upper Twister—near the top, where Little Ray, running on Prednisone, couldn’t keep going. Mr. Barlow had carried her piggyback the rest of the way, but there’d been no one to carry the old patroller to the top of Number Ten.

As Molly had told me on the dark morning we drove to Bromley to look for my mom and the snowshoer, the lift-maintenance mechanics showed up at six, before anyone else. That was why Willy was in Upper Twister on a snowmobile before sunrise; in his headlight, he saw the old patroller lying in the Rock Garden. Willy was on his way to the lift stations at the top of Number One and Number Ten. Willy would have known the one and only chairlift Molly was headed for when her heart stopped—the foremost, downhill-facing chair of Number Ten, my mom’s favorite, the Blue Ribbon Quad.

Willy wasn’t a patroller, but the lift mechanic knew the old patroller had died where she’d fallen. Out of respect for Molly, Willy wanted her fellow patrollers to take her where she’d been going. Willy said he might have made Molly look like she was lying more comfortably in the Rock Garden; he said he tried to make her appear to be merely resting.

Willy would have been talking on the radio to a few of his fellow lift mechanics in the maintenance shed. The patrollers working that day wouldn’t start showing up in the first-aid room before seven, but I’m sure some patrollers were called at home—the ones who’d known Molly the longest, the ones who loved her the most.

Old Ned and Meg had called me in Toronto—the two of them, together. Em had answered the phone. “It’s someone named Ned—he’s with a woman named Meg. It’s for you, kiddo,” Em told me, her voice breaking. I knew Molly must be gone.

Ned was working only part-time as a patroller now, the way Molly had been a part-time ski instructor; Ned was almost as old as Molly. “The old girl got as far as the Rock Garden, Kid—she almost made it all the way, but she was carrying some extra weight in her backpack,” Ned said.

“What was she carrying?” I asked him; I was pretty sure I knew.

“A six-pack of beer, and enough Valium to do the trick—she was as cold as the beer cans, Kid. Our coldest night of the season—the end of January is as cold as it gets at Bromley, you know,” Ned said.

“I know,” I told him.

“Ned is morbid and tactless, Kid. You know that, too, don’t you?” Meg asked me.

“I know that, too,” I told her. I was fond of them; I wouldn’t have wanted to make the call they were making. I was already imagining how to tell Matthew about Molly.

I could see the rest of it—as Ned and Meg kept talking. The ski patrol had taken Molly to the top. Willy was with them when they settled the old patroller into Number Ten; the first chair headed down the mountain would be Molly’s last chairlift. Willy was the one who went inside the lift-station shack. He made sure the safety gate on the unloading platform was set in the right position; he checked the stop button, and looked over the bull wheel for ice.

While Willy drove his snowmobile to the base of the Blue Ribbon Quad, where he started the drive motor and turned on the safety system for Number Ten, Meg sat with her arm around Molly in the chairlift. Meg was almost as big as Molly; she was strong enough to hold Molly upright in the chair. Meg made one of the new patrollers sit on the other side of Molly for the ride down.

“She was a young woman who worshiped Molly—one of those solitary girls Molly went out of her way to look after,” Meg told me.

“You know Molly, Kid—she wouldn’t have wanted a guy riding down the mountain with her, even when she was dead,” Ned said.

“You’re sick, Ned—sick and morbid and tactless,” Meg told him.

“I know—I’m sorry, Kid,” Ned said.

Since she’d been working part-time, Molly told me she still woke up early, maybe earlier. The old patroller said she liked putting skins on her telemarks and skinning up Twister. She liked skiing down before the lifts were running; she liked skiing on the freshly groomed corduroy, before other skiers had skied on it. But I knew Molly. The old patroller wouldn’t have trained for skinning a mile up a mountain. Unlike my mom and Mr. Barlow, Molly didn’t train.

Molly was going on eighty-six. The old patroller was a big woman to be skinning a mile up Twister to the top of Bromley. I find it hard to imagine her heart stopping, but old Ned and Meg were amazed that Molly made it as far as the Rock Garden.

I thanked the two of them for their call, and for telling me what happened; then Em and I had to talk about it. If the snowshoer had been there, we said, Molly might have made it all the way. Elliot Barlow had gone the distance with my mom. Em and I said Molly shouldn’t have been by herself in the Rock Garden. If Mr. Barlow had been with her, even as small as the snowshoer was, she could have lugged the old patroller the rest of the way. Speaking as two of Elliot Barlow’s rescue jobs, Em and I believed the only hero could have done it. There’s no question the snowshoer would have tried.

Sometimes Em gets angry with me when she catches me “screwing around” with my Aspen screenplay—as she usually puts it. I can’t make up my mind about the title. I have two titles; they seem interchangeable to me. Loge Peak or Not a Ghost. Either they both work, or they both don’t. “If the film can’t get made, it won’t matter what you call it, kiddo,” Em reminds me. But an unmade movie never leaves you; an unmade movie doesn’t go away.

Sometimes I hear the voice of the woman on the subway, except that I’m not on the subway when I hear it—and it’s my mother’s voice I hear, not the voice of the woman who makes the underground announcements. I’m usually in the underpass, beneath the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge, when I hear my mom’s voice. Every sound is amplified there; kids riding their bicycles like to shriek, just to hear the echo. My mom thinks it’s funny to startle me.

“The next station is Summerhill—Summerhill Station, sweetie,” I hear her say. It scares the shit out of me, every time. Or there’s this one—the other stop announcement on all the older subway trains, on the Bloor and Yonge and Sheppard lines. “Arriving at Summerhill, sweetie—Summerhill Station,” my mother will say, in an echoing voice. Then I’ll hear her and the snowshoer laughing; I only occasionally see them in the underpass. Usually, when I see those two on the subway, or in Summerhill Station, they don’t speak at all.

As for the actual woman’s voice on the subway, she doesn’t say sweetie—I can’t imagine her saying it. I wouldn’t know who she was, if Matthew hadn’t told me. It was Matthew who noticed when the voice on the subway changed. It was sometime in 2007, Matthew said—when a new voice was prerecorded for the announcements on the older underground trains. I didn’t notice, but my mother must have noticed, and Matthew really liked the woman’s voice on the subway.

It would be some years later, in 2013, when Matthew told me her name. It was spring in Toronto. Matthew and I were watching some dumb game on TV. Matthew was scrutinizing his cell phone, too. He was twenty-two; I had the impression there was always something interesting on his phone. Em and I were in our seventies; we were dependent on Matthew to demystify the technology in our lives. Matthew showed us what we were doing wrong with our laptops and our cell phones; Matthew made the Internet more manageable.

That April evening, Em was watching the TV on a different channel in the kitchen. Obama was still president, but Em had been riled up since the 2010 midterm elections, when the Republicans retook control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Em hated the new Republicans more than she’d hated the old ones; she said the new ones hated Obama more.

“Tea Party assholes!” Matthew and I heard Em screaming; she must have been watching CNN.

“I’ll bet it’s Ted Cruz or Michele Bachmann,” Matthew told me.

“She said assholes, plural,” I reminded him.

“It’s Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann—they’re both assholes,” Matthew assured me.

That was when his cell phone spoke to us; the voice on the subway was on his cell phone. “The next station is Bathurst—Bathurst Station,” the woman on the subway said.

“Her name is Susan Bigioni,” Matthew told me, handing me his phone. A short film was on Matthew’s cell phone, a Toronto Transit Commission film. Voices of the TTC, it was called.

Susan Bigioni speaks on camera for only ten seconds. “Arriving at Bathurst—Bathurst Station,” the bright-eyed brunette says, more sincerely than my mother, no fooling around.

“She works as a TTC communications assistant,” Matthew said.

“You’re our communications assistant,” I told him.

“I know,” Matthew said.

“It won’t be an aw-shucks, seeming nice guy—not the next time, you assholes!” Em was screaming at Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann—or at everyone in the Tea Party, or at all the Republicans. Em had a point. There was an angry bullying about the patriotism down south—as we say in Canada, when we mean the United States. Matthew and I knew what Em meant—the next bad Republican president, whoever it was, wouldn’t have Reagan’s B-actor charm.

Matthew and I just went on watching the same dumb game. We kept replaying Susan Bigioni’s ten seconds about Bathurst Station; I don’t know why it held our attention. Maybe that was when I saw where I belonged—where the voice on the subway told me all the stops. It’s such a clear voice.

As Em and Matthew know, I hear the silence in the Rock Garden no less clearly.

I can tell when Em is thinking about Nora or the snowshoer—the way she lowers her eyes when she is cast down. I never know what to say. “There’s a reason we’re fiction writers, you know—real life sucks; make-believe is our business,” I try to tell her.

Em does a better job with me when she knows I’m in the Rock Garden. “There are German students somewhere, kiddo—they’re still singing,” Em keeps saying.

We were living full-time in Toronto when Trump was elected president and Em blamed those Democrats who didn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton. If there was ever a time for a FUCK THE DEMOCRATS sign, I feared this was it. But Em already knew a sign like that could be misunderstood; she didn’t want to be mistaken for a Trump supporter. Besides, our dry cleaning in Toronto was returned to us on hangers—no more shirt cardboards. I should have known. You can’t have enough GOOD RIDDANCE signs.

In December 2017—two days after my seventy-sixth birthday—I found The New York Times in disarray on our kitchen table, where Em had abandoned her uneaten breakfast. Enough time had passed since the Reagan obituary—Em was reading the Times again. (I was reading the Toronto Star; it was a good way to learn about the city.) I saw that the Times was open to another obituary. Cardinal Bernard Law had died in Rome. The former archbishop of Boston, the cardinal who covered up all those child molestations by priests, was gone. If there was ever a time for a GOOD RIDDANCE sign, here it was.

I saw the torn-apart cardboard carton on the kitchen floor—a box from Blood Brothers Brewing; she’d taken one of the cardboard panels for her sign. I had an idea where Em would go with her message.

There was a six-story building on Yonge Street, on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue. Em and I had talked about it. Both the shield and the name of the Archdiocese of Toronto were inscribed above the glass doors, where the words CATHOLIC PASTORAL CENTRE were written. The building didn’t look like a cathedral could be contained inside it. We never saw nuns coming or going—not a single priest with a collar, not that we could remember. Matthew must have gotten tired of hearing us wonder out loud about the place. He’d gone online, which only added to the Catholic mystery. There were archives, collections, artifacts; researchers could book an appointment, after consulting with the reference archivist. “Usually, or often, there is a photo of Pope Francis by the glass doors—he looks very nice, in a beneficent way,” Em had said.

This was where I found her, one December morning—in front of the beneficent-looking Pope Francis, or someone with the pope’s generous smile. I’d read only the last sentence of Cardinal Law’s obituary—the part about the pope’s presiding over the cardinal’s funeral rites in St. Peter’s, “an honor accorded to all cardinals based in Rome.”

I suggested to Em that she move away from the photo of Pope Francis. It isn’t always the pope who is pictured there; the photos change. But I’m pretty sure it was Pope Francis this December morning. “Someone might think the pope has died, and you’re saying good riddance to him,” I said to Em. The longer we stood on the Yonge Street sidewalk, the more we were in the way of people headed for the subway—or people coming from the subway station on Shaftesbury Avenue. That was when the young priest suddenly appeared, as if he’d been born with his hand holding Em’s arm in her warmest winter parka. He had the unflagging enthusiasm of an assistant coach on an athletic team, or like someone new to his job.

“You look unhappy—good riddance to what, or to whom?” he asked her. We’d not seen him emerge from the glass doors of the archdiocese building. Maybe the young priest had nothing to do with the Catholic Pastoral Centre; he could have been coming from the subway, or he might have been on his way to it. He’d appeared so suddenly, it was as if he descended from heaven.

“Cardinal Bernard Law is dead—good riddance to him,” Em said, almost shyly. “He knew about those sexually abused children—he protected the pedophile priests,” Em told the young priest, slightly more assertively. His scarf was knotted loosely, his overcoat unbuttoned, as if the winter weather didn’t affect him; the whiteness of his priestly collar stood out on the gray sidewalk. “The Vatican rewarded Cardinal Law—they made him a high priest of some big-deal basilica,” Em said, more boldly.

“The Basilica of Saint Mary Major,” the young priest assented, nodding grimly. This would go nowhere, I was thinking. I took hold of Em’s other arm, pointing across Yonge Street to the Boxcar Social—a coffeehouse she liked.

“You didn’t eat your breakfast—would you like a croissant?” I asked Em. She nodded—in the fierce way she used to nod when she wasn’t speaking. When Em nodded this way, it made me afraid she could revert to nonspeaking without warning or explanation.

“Croissants are sinful!” the young priest cried; he came with us. The walk light takes forever when you’re trying to cross Yonge Street there, but the light seemed to change for us as soon as the young priest pressed the button. “Mind you, croissants are not as sinful as Cardinal Law,” the priest was saying. “Cardinal Law isn’t in Rome anymore. ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’ Hebrews 10:31, I think,” he told us. Em and I just looked at each other. This might go somewhere after all, we thought.

Each of us had a croissant. We were drinking our tea or coffee when Em got up the nerve to ask the young priest if he meant that Cardinal Law would face “harsher judgment”—where the evil cardinal was going.

“Romans 12:19, maybe. ‘Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath’—this is where the ‘Vengeance is Mine’ bit comes in,” the young priest told us. Em had unzipped her parka, but she’d kept it on; this was when I noticed she was wearing her pajamas and her fleece-lined slippers.

“The ‘Vengeance is Mine’ bit,” Em repeated, in the deadpan way Nora would have said it at the Gallows.

“Deuteronomy, definitely—32:35. It’s more of the ‘says the Lord’ bit—the good old ‘heap coals of fire on his head’ bit,” the young priest explained to us, making us almost feel sorry for Cardinal Law, given everything that was in store for him. “Proverbs 25:22, if I’m not mistaken,” the young priest modestly added. I liked him. He was doing his best to make Em feel better—with the “coals of fire on his head” part, and all the rest of it.

When I got up from our table to pay the bill, Em was telling the young priest we were writers. I could see him writing down our names and the titles of our books. The priest was writing on the GOOD RIDDANCE sign. When I found out the priest had paid for everything, I went back to our table. Our heaven-sent priest had departed. Em told me he’d left the way he came—a young man in a hurry. “It’s a heap of the ‘says the Lord’ bit, if you ask me,” was all Em would say about it. At least she was still speaking.

Outside, on the Yonge Street sidewalk, the young priest had disappeared—if he really was a priest, if we actually saw him. Em was annoyed that he’d taken her sign, whoever he was. I saw our reflection in a storefront window. I was wearing a pair of my Roots sweatpants, what I usually wrote in—we were just an old couple, still able to walk. Em saw us reflected in the window. “It’s a good thing we’re fiction writers, kiddo, or they might make us retire,” Em said.

Our reflections in the storefront window were transparent—we could see through each other. We knew we wouldn’t retire; writers can’t stop writing. But one of us would die first. I hoped it would be me—my head on my desk, in the middle of a sentence Em would finish for me. She knew me well enough. I didn’t want to find Em with her head on her desk. I couldn’t imagine finishing Em’s last sentence. There are no mountains to climb in Toronto—no last chairlifts for Em and me, only last sentences.

What do we want most when we’re children, and crave more when we’re old? Consistency is what counts the most. We want the people we love to be consistent, to stay the same—don’t we? I can’t really tell Em what I feel about my mom, because Em has no reason to love her awful mother—nor should she. We’re alone in the way we love our mothers, or in the way we don’t.

When I see Little Ray on the subway, when she and the snowshoer are just fooling around, I miss her when she was even younger than that—before she met Molly or the snowshoer, when I was a child and I was already learning to miss her. Now that my mom is gone, I miss what was constant about her—or the most constant thing about her. When I was a child, my missing her was the most constant thing in my life. You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.

The older I get, this is what I remember best about my mother. I’d told her I didn’t like the dark. Kids generally don’t like the dark, do they? I said I didn’t like the dark, or words to that effect.

“Hug the dark, sweetie, and the dark will hug you back,” my mom said. “But the dark has other dates to make, sweetie—if you don’t hold her tight, she won’t wait around all night.”

“The dark is a she?” I asked her, but my mom was gone. Little Ray didn’t wait around. She just vanished, like a ghost.

I try not to think about the vanishing.